Psychologically the methods of sequence and accent lie at the opposite pole to that of concord.  Where they are all for implication, for subtlety of feeling, concord is impatient of the least ambiguity but must have its well-certificated tags at every turn.  Concord tends to dispense with order.  In Latin and Chinook the independent words are free in position, less so in Bantu.  In both Chinook and Bantu, however, the methods of concord and order are equally important for the differentiation of subject and object, as the classifying verb prefixes refer to subject, object, or indirect object according to the relative position they occupy.  These examples again bring home to us the significant fact that at some point or other order asserts itself in every language as the most fundamental of relating principles.

The observant reader has probably been surprised that all this time we have had so little to say of the time-honored “parts of speech.”  The reason for this is not far to seek.  Our conventional classification of words into parts of speech is only a vague, wavering approximation to a consistently worked out inventory of experience.  We imagine, to begin with, that all “verbs” are inherently concerned with action as such, that a “noun” is the name of some definite object or personality that can be pictured by the mind, that all qualities are necessarily expressed by a definite group of words to which we may appropriately apply the term “adjective.”  As soon as we test our vocabulary, we discover that the parts of speech are far from corresponding to so simple an analysis of reality.  We say “it is red” and define “red” as a quality-word or adjective.  We should consider it strange to think of an equivalent of “is red” in which the whole predication (adjective and verb of being) is conceived of as a verb in precisely the same way in which we think of “extends” or “lies” or “sleeps” as a verb.  Yet as soon as we give the “durative” notion of being red an inceptive or transitional turn, we can avoid the parallel form “it becomes red, it turns red” and say “it reddens.”  No one denies that “reddens” is as good a verb as “sleeps” or even “walks.”  Yet “it is red” is related to “it reddens” very much as is “he stands” to “he stands up” or “he rises.”  It is merely a matter of English or of general Indo-European idiom that we cannot say “it reds” in the sense of “it is red.”  There are hundreds of languages that can.  Indeed there are many that can express what we should call an adjective only by making a participle out of a verb.  “Red” in such languages is merely a derivative “being red,” as our “sleeping” or “walking” are derivatives of primary verbs.